We abandoned the "minimal" concept a while back and Light became somewhat of an experiment to see what works best on lower power machines. LXDE is quite new and exciting, so this is a good place to test it. Still not sure how final release will look.

Back in mid-April, I had reported success with VL-Lite 5.9b3 on my geriatric thinkpad 380z (p2-233, 153mb, 10gb), and thankfully the story remains the same with b5. VL remains the only distro that successfully installs on this machine, probably due to some unusual features on the motherboard, including an ISA bus and a cd-rom drive that many distros have difficulty reading from. The remaining distros that pass those two hurdles are apparently much worse at hardware detection than VL or aren't optimized for older hardware. Thus, once again, I give thanks.

Meanwhile, I tried out LXDE. It looks great. I'll have to figure out how to use it.

By the way, this may be off topic (so feel free to redirect me), but I can't find streamtuner in the repos. I have searched this forum, and it looks to me like it is packaged in SOHO. Is streamtuner compatable with VL-Lite? If no, can someone suggest the lightest possible alternative? For whatever reason, the old lappie is having a hell of a time streaming audio. It worked fine under Win98, so I know the hardware can handle it. Thanks.

In other news, someone may recall that I experienced weird behavior with wifi under b3 (which I reported in the b3 thread). The oddness continues with b5 because the wifi configuration does not work correctly for me, regardless of whether I run it from the vasmcc launcher or the command line with vwifi. No matter how many times I run the tool and no matter what I enter in my efforts to connect to whatever wireless network I specify, it always configures my card to pick up one particular network (one of my neighbor's); but the good news is that everything works as it should from the command line, and I was able to modify my rc.local file in order to force a connection to my network on boot.

Because everything is now working as I want it to, I am merely reporting some unexpected behavior. I have no idea if other users experience this kind of thing, but it may be worth looking into.

I must confess that I am impressed. You might remember that I criticized the idea of VL light much when it was born but it seems I`ll have to change my mind on this.

I managed to set up my wifi with VLwifi and I`m writing from VL Light at this moment.

LXDE looks nice however I had a crash and after Ctrl+Alt+Backspace the bottom panel disapperead.

I noticed some inconsistency: When I plugged a USB stick it was mounted and files were displayed with xfe manager. I tried to open an .xls file but it seems that that xfe doesn`t associate it with gnumeric, pcmanfm does associate properly. Why 2 file managers at all? This can be so anyway but shouldn`t they have the same associations for filetypes? Similiary why 2 text edistors? Adie associated with pcmanfm and 'x file writer' with xfe.